


noise

by joisattempting



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: Alternate Universe - Homeless, Character Study, Gen, Homelessness, Late at Night, Midnight, Music, New York City, No Dialogue, Sort Of, obscure metaphors, sarah thinks she’s poetic, this is my first character study so i apologise if it’s bad ldksjdjs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22928371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joisattempting/pseuds/joisattempting
Summary: most didn’t like the noise. but whizzer brown wasn’t like most.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	noise

**Author's Note:**

> written to fulfill the prompt “midnight strolls”, with my own personal twist!
> 
> hello!! this,,, idk what this is. i saw so many wonderful, really well-written character studies out there, and i wanted to try my hand at it! i’ll admit, i struggled with the first paragraph or so, but hopefully it gets better as the story goes on?¿ 
> 
> it’s been difficult finding new ideas since ending college au, but i’m hoping you’re enjoying them if you chose to stick around! sometimes i’m not sure if ending it was a good thing,,,
> 
> anyway! i put a lot of effort into this, so i hope you like it! comments and kudos mean the world to me, i get so so happy reading them <33

Most didn’t like the noise. The honking horns, the cacophonous babble, the fluorescent lights that stabbed at your eyes like a million bright daggers. Most tossed and turned in bed in their neat brownstone apartments, cursing the day they’d packed up and caught a plane to the city when they were alive and starry-eyed. Kids with nothing but a dream and a meager few dollars to their name. That was all you were when you arrived in the boisterous, brazen New York City; a name, drowning and gasping for air in a deep sea of so many others. 

However, Whizzer Brown wasn’t like most. 

The witching hour creeped nearer and nearer - he could practically hear the seconds ominously ticking by, a mental timer that never seemed to turn off. Evoking that specific feeling of deep panic that typically came about when an invigilator called five during a particularly stressful exam. It caught up with him every now and again, only not because there were five minutes remaining for his dyslexic self to finish the paper’s twelve-marker essay question, but for reasons far heavier. 

Quite a lot had been on his mental plate for the past few days. Adult things, like money and tax and jobs. He could cross the third off his list; the useless clerk job he worked five days a week earned him some, but not much. His boss, a chubby, lumbering man, couldn’t give two fucks about whether or not Whizzer showed at the sparse, cramped boutique. But he knew fine well that, if he hadn’t done a thing or two that he perhaps shouldn’t have with that man, the tiny can of watery baked beans he’d eaten several hours ago wouldn’t be gurgling and sitting in his sunken, dipping stomach.

The run-down, battered black Camry was parked in a lot belonging to a secluded Denny’s, its whining, tired old engine temporarily unconscious. The door to the trunk was up, and Whizzer sat with his legs dangling freely. He needs new trousers. He has for some time. Smoke wriggled free from its cylindrical holding cell, snaking its way into the air from the cigarette threatening to slip from its owner’s thin fingers. Whizzer doesn’t smoke often. The chemicals intensify his hunger, but he can’t eat. Not often, at least. His fatigue persists, but he can’t sleep. 

There was something expensive about the black twilight. Something ridiculously monetary pertaining to the hundreds of stars that winked torridly down at him like the younger boys at the bar. The younger boys, whose tight leatherwear looked to Whizzer like oversized hand-me-downs from older siblings because their mothers couldn’t bother to purchase them their own, whose boyish faces were lined with a presumptuous, child-like sense of adventure. Those younger boys, with floppy hair and awe-stricken eyes, seemed such amateurs, such children to Whizzer. Something costly, something sophisticated, something dirty and wary and unscrupulous about the moon and the brash, drunken, reeling midnight, that never seemed to go away regardless of how long Whizzer looked at it. 

He enjoyed getting lost. He enjoyed straying from his car and allowing his feet to drag his tired body wherever they so desired. Car horns and the dull chug of the overhead trains were his music; a shared playlist with his friends, his New York. Sometimes he wondered how he was able to sleep back in the Midwest, with its absence of therapeutic noise that sang his complimentary lullabies when he curled up underneath his ragged blanket in the boot of the beat-up Camry. Without the ebullient, romping nightlights on Broadway Street that brought visions of jigging, dancing coloured dots as he descended into fitful slumber. He’d never survive at his childhood home, where the tranquility and eerie silhouettes of mundane things would make him fidget and kick at the rocketship comforter. Noise, noise that agitated the married businessmen in their prissy brownstones, had become his silence.

Another thing he pondered was whether or not that was a good thing. 

Just one more difference between man to man. One more abnormality. One more reason why said businessmen, the ones that fiddled with the wedding bands that were as bland as they were, turned their noses up at him when they saw him awake each dreaded morning in his motionless car, with a nasty hangover and a stiff neck. 

He turned a corner, grateful to be away from the still, silent street. Because, again, the quiet kept him on tenterhooks. The threatening quiet, a local bully that always seemed to relish in picking on Whizzer. The quiet watched him, as though each brown smudge of a building possessed eyes. His feet ached in his sneakers, the soles of which were beginning to fall, trying to cling by threads like their wearer to stability. Every day he reminded himself to purchase new ones whenever he saw the light at the end of this tunnel of homelessness. 

There was noise on this street. He relaxed. He was an addict, on top of the universe as his drug zipped through his body like jets in the cringeworthy cornflower sky. Music, his favourite sort of drug, blared from a nearby bar. A familiar one to Whizzer, yet not one he visited often. 

To Whizzer, it was called the “witching hour” for a totally different reason. When he was more of a child than he was at this point in time, his big sister had told him, in the uneasy stillness of his bedroom, a flashlight illuminating her somewhat-boyish, cheeky features, that the witching hour was when ancient, cackling women with crooked noses swooped into their hushed Nebraska town to steal away the little boys who lay awake. Nowadays, Whizzer wasn’t sure why he’d been so scared. It reminded him of that classical piece, when all the skeletons and creatures and witches materialised from areas of the graveyard at midnight on October thirty-first, to dance until dawn broke.  _ Danse Macabre,  _ it was called. He remembered it well. He remembered the tricky sheet music he’d slaved over in orchestra back in high school. 

Whizzer thrived at midnight. Its mysterious loudness reminded him of himself. His own personal witching hour, when his inner graveyard’s creatures danced and played jaunty violin folk songs upon the cracking tombstones. Only, the string instrument’s songs were the muffled music flitting out of the murky bar, and the graves were replaced with sidewalks and dusty cobbles. 

His head and body began to spin, like his favourite top from childhood. He reeled and stumbled and swung from stoic lampposts, barking laughter mingling amongst the uproarious sound of impatient horns and pub music, the sheer volume of which made his stomach ache. Grimy, black Chuck Taylors with broken laces tap-danced against metaphorical tombstones, sending clouds of grey dust soaring into the air like lava from a volcano. 

It was then, at the witching hour, on the Halloween night that never passed, when the city came to life for him, and him only. When all the businessmen were in bed, shutting themselves away from their dreary, cold, mundane New York. When he could run and jump and spin in his torn trousers and battered shoes. When the red traffic lights and the bright signs of Broadway cast an inviting, artificial sunlight on his drawn, thin face. 

Whizzer danced. And New York was his faithful partner; it was there for him at the same time every night. 

The time when the city was so loud, it seemed quiet.

The time when, for just a little while, things were just the way Whizzer Brown liked them to be. 

  
  
  


_ fin.  _

  
  



End file.
